before Captain Cook’s arrival in Hawaii in 1778, Hawaiian was strictly an oral language. Cook and his men recorded the Hawaiian language for the first time in 1778. They noticed that the language was similar to Tahitian and Maori.

When the first missionaries arrived in Hawaii in 1820, they converted the oral Hawaiian language to a written language so that they were able to convey the messages of the Bible to the Hawaiian people.

By 1826, the missionaries had created a Hawaiian alphabet. They also taught Hawaiians to read and write the language and translated the Bible into Hawaiian.

The first printed book was in 1815 it seems. Before that, the language was an oral language exclusively. Māori is closely related to Tahitian and Rarotongan, which is spoken in the southern Cook Islands.